Good luck Tyler!

One of my favourite hockey blogs for over a year now has been Mc79, a statistical analytical oiler fan blog.  The guy that wrote all the posts and did all the number crunching was Tyler Dellow, a mad oilers fan living in Toronto.  I learned a lot from his stats, more from his writing.  I was lucky to be introduced to this aspect of the game by this guy.  I think his site had the most readable content in the field, and thus the most accessable.  The fact that he's an oilers fan just made it all the more relevant.  And the fact that the content was pretty good?  Well, that just made the whole exercise even more valuable.

The other night I went to check his blog.  It wasn't up any more.  It's been going for about ten years.  There'd been no warning.  This was weird.  My first thought was 'oh no, something bad has happened to Tyler.'  I nosed around a bit on a few news sites.  I learned there that something else had happened.

Tyler has in fact been hired as an advisor to the Oilers' coach, Dallas Eakins!  I presume part of the deal was he take down all the freely available analysis he's posted over the years.  'Great!' to the first, 'Bugga!' to the second.  For him, personally, I am very happy.  For me, and all the other readers of his site like me, I am sad.  For us readers who are also Oilers fans, I guess it all cancels out and I'll wait and see how it pans out.

In the meantime, I just want to say a big THANKS to Tyler for introducing me to a whole 'deep' level of this game I've come to love, and say that I really hope it all works out for you!